Durzo wasn’t making sense. He knew Kylar was dying. It must have been the poison. “I do forgive you,” Kylar said. “May our deaths not be on each other’s heads.”

Durzo’s eyes lit suddenly and he seemed to rally against the poison in his veins. He smiled. “I didn’t poison …the dart…. The letter …” Durzo died in mid-breath, a slight tremor passing through his body, his eyes still fixed on Kylar.

Kylar closed Durzo’s eyes. A hollow enormity swallowed his stomach. A cry was stuck somewhere inside him, lost in the dark emptiness in his throat. Kylar stood woodenly, not taking enough care. The corpse slid from his lap, its head smacking roughly on the iron walkway. Its limbs were loose, graceless, lying in an uncomfortable position. Unmoving. Just like any corpse. In life, every man was unique. In death, every man was meat. Durzo was like any deader.

Numb, Kylar reached into the corpse’s breast pocket and pulled out the letter Durzo had said was his inheritance. It was just under where Kylar had cut the wetboy’s chest.

The letter was soaked with blood. Whatever words had been scrawled on the paper were illegible. Whatever Durzo had meant to excuse, whatever he had meant to explain, whatever gift he had meant to give Kylar with his last words had died with him. Kylar was alone.

Kylar dropped to his knees, all his strength gone. He took the dead wetboy in his arms and wept. He stayed there for a long time.

61

Dawn found Kylar stumbling through the streets to one of his safe houses. Before he’d finally left, he’d erected a cairn over Durzo’s body on the northern tip of Vos Island. At that hour, no one had been in sight. Kylar had stolen a rowboat from the dock and let the current carry him to the Warrens, too exhausted to paddle.

He’d docked at the shop where he’d killed Rat. It was still dark and inconspicuous, perfect for his kind of work. He wondered if Rat was still anchored in the muck, his unquiet spirit staring up at Kylar’s little boat with the hatred and evil that had once lived in his adolescent heart.

It was a morning for lonely meditations. Kylar disabled the traps on his door automatically and stumbled inside. Blint had been right. It would have been suicide to go after Roth last night. Kylar had been so exhausted he’d thought it was poison working on him. He probably wouldn’t have made it through a single meister.

It might be worth it to trade life for life to rid the earth of Roth Ursuul, but Kylar wasn’t going to die for nothing. He locked the door, then stopped and turned back. He locked each of the three locks three times. Lock, unlock, lock. For you, master.

He took the pitcher of water and filled the basin with water and took the soap and began cleaning the blood from his hands. The face in the mirror was cold, calm as he washed the last vestiges of his master’s life away. Blood marred the handle of the pitcher, just a little. Just a small, dark smear from the blood on his hands.

Kylar snatched the pitcher up and hurled it through the mirror. Both pitcher and mirror shattered, spraying glass and porcelain and water against the wall, into the room, onto his clothes, onto his face. He dropped to his knees and wept.

Finally, he slept. When he woke, he felt better than he had any right to. He washed himself and felt refreshed. As he scraped off his stubble, he caught himself grinning in one of the shards of the mirror. Blint didn’t mean to kill me at all, but he couldn’t resist putting a dart in me just to show that he could. The old bastard. Kylar laughed. The really old bastard.

It was gallows humor, but he needed whatever he could find.

He got dressed and armed, thinking mournfully of the gear he’d lost last night. Daggers, poisons, grappling hooks, throwing knives, tanto, poisoner’s knife—he’d lost all of his favorites except for Retribution. Mourning my gear, but not Logan or Durzo or Elene. It was so ridiculous that Kylar laughed again.

He was, he decided, a little off. Maybe it was natural. He’d never lost anyone he really cared about before. Now he’d lost three in one night.

The streets were crowded in the late afternoon when Kylar finally emerged from his safe house. Rumors were flying about what had happened at the castle in the night. An army had appeared from thin air. An army had boiled up out of the Vos Island Crack. An army of mages from the south had come. No, they were wytches from the north. Highlanders had killed everyone in the castle. Khalidor was going to raze the entire city.

Few of the rumormongers seemed worried. Kylar saw a few people with their belongings loaded onto carts or wagons and heading out of the city, but there weren’t many. No one else seemed to believe that anything bad could happen to them.

Momma K’s hideout was still being guarded by the sinewy Cewan pretending to fix the fence. Kylar didn’t bother becoming invisible. He approached the man unhurriedly, leaned over to ask directions and put a hand on the man’s concealed short sword. The man tried to draw too late and found the sword locked in Kylar’s grip. Kylar broke the man’s sternum with an open-handed strike, leaving him gasping, his mouth working like a fish’s.

Kylar took the keys from the man’s belt and opened the door. He locked it after himself and embraced the shadows.

Invisible, he found Momma K in the study looking over reports from her brothels. He read them silently over her shoulder. She was trying to piece together what had happened at the castle.

The needle sank into the sagging flesh at the back of her arm. She cried out and clawed at it. She pulled the needle out then turned her chair slowly, looking ancient.

“Hello, Kylar,” she said. “I expected you yesterday.”

He appeared in the other chair, a lounging young Death. “How’d you know it was me?”

“Durzo would have used a poison that would leave me in agony.”

“It’s a tincture of ariamu root and jacinth spoor,” Kylar said. “The agony’s coming.”

“A slow poison. So you decided to give me time. What for, Kylar? To apologize? To cry? To beg?”

“To think. To remember. To regret.”

“So this is retribution. There’s a new young killer on the streets doling out what old whores deserve.”

“Yes, and you deserve to lose the very thing that made you betray Durzo.”

“And what’s that, oh wise one?” She smiled a serpent’s smile.

“Control.” Kylar’s tone was flat, apathetic. “And don’t reach for the bell rope. I’ve got a hand crossbow, but it’s not accurate. I might hit your hand rather than the rope.”

“Control, is that what you call it,” Momma K said, her back ramrod straight, not making it a question. “Do you know that rapes aren’t spread out evenly, even among working girls? Some girls get raped again and again. Others never do. The ones who get raped are the victims. The rapist bastards can somehow tell. It’s not ‘control,’ Kylar. It’s dignity. Do you know how much dignity a fourteen-year-old has when her pimp won’t protect her?

“When I was fourteen, I was taken to a noble’s house and enjoyed for fifteen hours by him and his ten closest friends. I had to make a choice after that, Kylar, and I chose dignity. So if you think giving me a poison that makes me shit myself to death is going to make me beg, you’re sadly mistaken.”

Kylar was unmoved. “Why did you betray us?”

Momma K’s defiance slowly faded as Kylar sat there with a wetboy’s patience. She didn’t answer him for a minute, five minutes. He sat with all the patience of Death. By now, he knew, she had to be feeling queasy.

“I loved Durzo,” she said.

Kylar blinked. “You what?”

“I’ve slept with hundreds of married men in my life, Kylar, so I never saw the most flattering portrait of marriage. But if he’d asked me, I would have married Durzo Blint. Durzo is—was, I suppose you killed him? Yes, I thought so. Durzo was a good man in his way. An honest man.” Her lips twitched. “I couldn’t handle honesty. He told me too many unlovely truths about myself, and that hard, dark thing that lives in me couldn’t bear the light.”